The Middle of the Middle of Nowhere

Sorry for the lack of posts in the past week, but we have been busy having the experience of a lifetime.  Before we left, we had decided that we would pick a destination for a week once we arrived down here and had some discussions with Ken.  Around Christmas, we had narrowed it down to either going up to Lake Titicaca and La Paz or to go to the Uyuni Salt Flats.  In the end, we talked it over as a family and decided to go on a 3 day tour of the Salar de Uyuni with Ken and Andres.

For those who are not familiar with Bolivian geography, here is a link to a map.  If you don't feel up to clicking the link, Santa Cruz is on the eastern side of the country in the low lands and Uyuni is in the south west part of the country in some of the highest and most remote areas.  This unfortunate geographical situation meant that to get to Uyuni to start the tour meant that we had to take some crazy travel steps at the last minute.  We quickly figure out that we didn't want to go from our altitude in Santa Cruz to the altitude in Uyuni, and also didn't want to fly through La Paz because of the altitude sickness we experienced on the way in, so we needed to be a little creative and patient on the travel plans to allow for adjusting as we increased in altitude.

Ken and I did some digging over the last week of December and booked a return flight to Sucre from from Santa Cruz.  Sucre is a t 9,214 feet above sea level, or just above where most doctors say you should take altitude sickness pills before arriving.  We figured we would roll the dice, stay overnight and then continue from there.  We were lucky enough to have no illnesses upon landing and made our way to the Grand Hotel.  The Grand Hotel is a lovely simple little place and Ken was super excited to get the Che suite where Che Guevara had recuperated once upon a time.

The next morning, we left on the next leg of our journey by getting on a bus from Sucre to Uyuni.  The bus to Uyuni is an 8 hour experience of rising altitudes, switchback roads, and rocking back and forth through some of the greatest scenery in the world.  Uyuni is 377km from Sucre, but thanks to the difficult roads, climbs etc, it is an 8 hour ride.  By the time we wound our way out of Sucre, Logan was unfortunately not feeling well and spent most of the ride with his head out the window and threw up a couple of times due to the increasing altitude.  Everybody else was good to go.

About half way, we passed through Potosi at 13,420 feet above sea level and eventually arrived at Uyuni at 12,139 feet.  Uyuni is a small (some would say backwater) community that basically just exists as a launching point for tours of the Salt Flats.  We checked into our "hotel" which was a hostel where the 7 of us were split into 4 rooms after spending 15 minutes having the front desk clerk tell us that our rooms were not booked only to have the manager walk up and point to it on the page immediately.  Ah, the joys of travel.

The next morning at 10:30, our driver met us at the hotel and we piled into a late 90s Toyota Land Cruiser, piled our very limited luggage on top along with two large cans of gas and a spare tire to start the grand adventure.  The first stop on the tour was right outside of Uyuni at the train graveyard.  This is where Bolivia retired their trains over the course of the years, so there are trains from the 1890s up to fairly recent in various states of decomposition and graffiti.  I spent most of my time there looking for train number 5 which was the payroll train that Butch Cassidy robbed.  The kids loved this site because you can climb on all the trains as much as you want.  Sadly, in order to stay on schedule, we only had 20 minutes to spend.

 We then set off on the real adventure out in the direction of the salt flats.  The ground slowly transitioned from dirt, to salty dirt, to pure white salt and was completely amazing.  Our first stop was at the salt collection piles where they pile up the salt to dry in order to collect it.  We were lucky enough to have had rain the night before, so it meant an inch or two of water at the base of the piles which made for amazing pictures.  It also made for feet covered in salt and crusty pant bottoms.

After standing on several piles and taking a ton of pictures, we continued on to where the Dakar rally scheduled for a few days later was to start. Lucky for us, they had created some amazing carvings out of salt to prepare for the race.

Then we set off across white barren nothingness that frequently tricked us Saskatchewan folks into thinking we were driving across a barren prairie covered in snow, but in 20 degree above weather.  It was a strange sensation indeed.

Suddenly, our driver stopped the in the middle of nowhere and told us to get out.  This is where my spidey senses started tingling, but when he bent over near a small hole in the ground and started picking away, we all got a lot more interested.  It turns out that the salt flats, are only a relatively thin sheet of salt on top of about 2 or 3 meters of water and salt.  Just under the surface is water and in the water, salt crystals form.  Our driver was showing us how to dig for salt crystals to take home.

After digging for a while and finding some nice crystals (and cutting our hands on the sharp salt under the surface), we started taking perspective pictures.  Since the salt flat has no real items to measure distance by, you can take interesting pictures like these.

Of course you all look a little silly while trying to pull these cool pictures off as demonstrated by Ken and Andres as they try to walk into a mug directly in front of the the camera man.

After a bunch of pics, we piled back into the Land Cruiser and continued on to what the driver described as "the island".  We arrived at the island at around lunch time, so the driver made our lunch while we explored.  The island is a coral island covered in cacti in the middle of the salt flat.

We climbed to the top and took some amazing pictures of the surrounding flats and then climbed back down and had a well deserved lunch.  The bottom picture above shows the view from the top and the little dots are some people walking around the base of the island for perspective. We drove for quite some time and ended the day by checking into our Hotel of Salt for the night in which, everything was made of salt including the tables, chairs and beds.  Thus ended day 1.